Flu in Fiction – Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Wolfe

A lot of people have been writing about Katherine Anne Porter’sPale Horse, Pale Rider, a novella inspired by Porter’s near-fatal struggle with flu during the 1918 pandemic. But Thomas Wolfe also wrote memorably about the catastrophic illness his autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel.

“In ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider,’ the heroine, Miranda, takes ill during the flu pandemic of 1918. Living on scant wages in a boarding house, she contemplates her immediate past from her sickbed, and among the images that loom and leer in her dreams the most significant involve a horse she rode while growing up on a farm in the South—the horse, we gradually understand, symbolizes death.”

Als quotes a Paris Review interview in which Porter said of the flu:

“It just simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, ready. It took me a long time to go out and live in the world again. I was really ‘alienated,’ in the pure sense. It was, I think, the fact that I really had participated in death, that I knew what death was, and had almost experienced it. I had what the Christians call the ‘beatific vision,’ and the Greeks called the ‘happy day,’ the happy vision just before death. Now if you have had that, and survived it, come back from it, you are no longer like other people, and there’s no use deceiving yourself that you are.”

“His brother, Benjamin Harrison Wolfe, was ill with the flu. He tells the thinly fictionalized story in Chapter 35 of his novel, Look Homeward, Angel.

“Wolfe came home to a deathwatch. His brother was lying in a sickroom upstairs while his family waited for what they feared was inevitable. Wolfe went upstairs to the ‘gray, shaded light’ of the room where Ben lay. And he saw, ‘in that moment of searing recognition,’ that his beloved 26-year-old brother was dying.”

Wolfe writes in Look Homeward, Angel that the stand-in for his brother, a character also named Ben, lay in his bed, the outline of his body “bitterly twisted below the covers, in an attitude of struggle and torture.” Ben’s sallow complexion had turned gray and his body gasped for air:

“And the sound of this gasping – loud, hoarse, rapid, unbelievable, filling the room, and every moment in it – gave to the scene its final note of horror.”